On Wolves in the Throne Room's earliest releases, they repurposed the furor of black metal, reshaping its sprints into half-marathons and adding classical overtones. Their latest foregoes the former volume and tempo for a liminal mix of synthesizers and beat machines, droning guitars and cascading horns.
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When, during the first decade of their existence, have Wolves in the Throne Room not been over it? From the beginning, the music that Nathan and Aaron Weaver made thrived on inherent unease with expectations. On their earliest releases, they repurposed the furor of black metal, reshaping its sprints into half-marathons and adding classical overtones—operatic vocals, instrumental denouements, recurrent themes—to fashion arching, dramatic epics. “Our black metal is the product of our personal and specific history,” they said in an early, telling interview, “irrespective of other bands that share certain stylistic elements.” They wanted to be anonymous. They wanted to cordon themselves from their closest stylistic peers. They wanted separation.
That distance, in turn, became one of music’s great recent press hooks: Wolves in the Throne Room lived on a farm, not off the grid but wanting to be while growing a wide variety of vegetables and raising livestock. That tale became part of most every Wolves in the Throne Room story—how the band couldn’t wait to leave the road, to return “to living in a rhythmic sort of rural way.” Otherness was the very core of their creation myth. True to form, though, that jig was soon up, too; after the agrarian fable had been recounted countless times and driven more than one album cycle, the band admitted that maybe homesteading wasn’t such an imperative, that Nathan Weaver didn’t even like sunlight very much. Still, following the release of 2011’s Celestial Lineage, their most compellingly restless album to date, they announced with some pomp that they were taking a break—not so much breaking up as “reconnecting to hearth and home.” With Wolves in the Throne Room, most everything has always been an antagonistic, reactive event.
Given that steady tradition of ever-shifting defiance, Wolves in the Throne Room’s first album in three years, Celestite, represents a logical oxbow. The 46-minute record foregoes the band’s former volume and tempo for a liminal mix of synthesizers and beat machines, droning guitars and cascading horns. There are no propulsive blast beats or breathless tremolo guitars, no whispering-then-rushing song structures or majestically interjecting vocals. Instead, the Weavers used a panoply of modular and analog synthesizers to improvise collage-like instrumentals that pivot between the legacies of a dozen obvious predecessors. Those heroes come scattered between New Age and doom metal, industrial and electronica: Brian Eno, Coil, John Carpenter, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Wendy Carlos, Mark Isham, Stephen O’Malley and so on. Backed by horns and woodwinds and assisted by producer Randall Dunn, Wolves in the Throne Room weave these five pieces together through slowly cycling beats and gradually decaying tones, attempting to create a seamless if very separate corollary to Celestial Lineage.
“We didn’t want to have songs in that traditional sense,” Aaron Weaver recently told the blog Steel for Brains about the material on Celestite. “We wanted to have soundscapes, and we wanted to have washes. We wanted to have planets moving past each other.” But Celestite isn’t quite the about-face it may first seem or that the Weavers might have you to believe. Ambient and exploratory passages have always been an intriguing part of Wolves in the Throne Room’s approach, from the ululating female vocals that served as preludes to the field recordings and granulated sounds that functioned as interludes. In the past, those moments were mere window dressing, accessories that emboldened the power of everything else. Here, though, they become the main event, the off-ramp from outright rampage to crystal healing. Celestite is a small sample of the Wolves in the Throne Room aesthetic, writ large and with aplomb.
But Celestite falls far short of the canonical references it invokes, offering an attenuated version of the trips that its predecessors once provided. The same dogged mercury that made Wolves in the Throne Room interesting even when frustrating for the last decade turns Celestite into an indecisive mess. The operative pieces of opener “Turning Ever Towards the Sun”, for instance, are the first two words of its title; a montage of notions and ideas, it swivels between twinkling minimalism and droning languor, full-volume noise and movie-theme melodies, icy drift and humid electronica. During the 11-minute piece’s second half, a phantom beat emerges, throbbing beneath the shifts overhead. The pulse intensifies and quickens, suggesting that all this harried motion might lead to one magnetic moment. But the momentum stalls out, the possibility falling either to the band’s technical failure or philosophical non-commitment. It’s less a singular, captivating journey, a la Cluster or Popol Vuh, than a jumble of unsorted notions.
“Celestite Mirror,” the album’s other long haul, suffers the same shuffle mentality. The band moves between colossal organ roar and flute-led New Age vibrations, kill-switching the sounds as though the very concept of transition were poison. The piece ends with the record’s heaviest moment, as horns that could be sampled from a harrowing John Williams score undergird large-pawed guitar riffs. It’s flimsy, though, the Fisher-Price-sized version of Sunn O)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions. That coda is the doom analogy of the effete krautrock and horror soundtrack approximations that litter most of Celestite—the sound is there, just not its spirit.
In the past and at their best, Wolves in the Throne Room have been able to overpower the seams in their composite music, to rely more on the romance of their clamor than their middling skills as composers. They managed to retrofit black metal to post-rock by force, not finesse. But Celestite’s instrumental expanse provides no such quarter. Wantonly skipping between sounds with a dilettante zeal, Wolves in the Throne Room seem woefully under equipped for this music. It’s hard not to get the sense that they’ve simply been reading The New York Times.
Since word of Wolves in the Throne Room’s shift in sound began to spread earlier this year, there’s been a seeming quest for meaning in the decision, a search for profundity in their sudden deviation. Those who haven’t followed along have been dismissed as gate-guarding philistines, limited by definitions of metal or music or meaning at large. But why? Does a band deserve a free pass for making the “bold” decision to alienate its traditional fans, especially if that band’s reputation is built on a history of alienation at large? Apart from your allegiances to or apathy for black metal, isn’t it possible to see Celestite as a middling modular synthesizer record, where occasional moments of grace and power come swallowed by gyres of hesitation, especially when that electronic scene is now mining darkness on its own? Sure, Wolves in the Throne Room might be over black metal, but at least on Celestite, their next step remains far beyond their grasp.